Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (review)

In a new book from mit press, The Techno-Human Condition (Allenby & Sarewitz, 2011), the authors argue that the complex interplay of natural, human, and technological systems requires us to create a legal system that moves away from formality and procedural complexity toward “simple, transparent processes that can be changed as the context changes” (p. 165). In Wiki Government, Noveck, a law professor and former United States deputy chief technology officer for open government, presents an argument and case study for just such a set of processes. Noveck advocates “collaborative democracy,” which she defines as “a new approach for using technology to improve outcomes by soliciting expertise from self-selected peers working together in groups in open networks” (p. 17, emphasis in original). The book makes a detailed theoretical case for collaborative government, supported by her experience in creating and running a pilot project for the United States Patent and Trademark Office, “Peer To Patent,” designed to lessen the workload of patent examiners while improving the quality of their decision making by soliciting open reviews from technical experts. Far from being a technical discussion of the intersection of patent law and networking software, Wiki Government is a lucid, cogent, and impassioned call for new governmental systems capable of responding flexibly and openly to the challenges of a world of complex systems. As a teaching tool, the book is an excellent spark to interdisciplinary discussion of the interplay between technology and democracy, capable of engaging students at the familiar level of wikis and comment rating systems, and drawing them deep into discussions of contemporary democratic theory and Science and Technology Studies.

Noveck bolsters her call for collaborative democracy with three arguments: collaboration as a form of democratic participation distinct from deliberation, what she refers to as “visual deliberation,” or software interface design for collaborative ends, and egalitarian self-selection in participation. Her arguments draw from psychological and sociological research into deliberative practices, software user interface design and internet culture, contributing to the book’s value as an interdisciplinary teaching tool, as students are likely to have at least passing familiarity with one thread of her argument. In teaching patent law by having students build the Peer To Patent website at the core of her case study (http://www.peertopatent.org), produce educational videos about the patent process, write plain-English directions for using the website, and draft terms of use and site policy documents, Noveck used a teaching strategy far removed from that of the conventional American law school class, still mired in the turn-of-the-20^th-century Harvard model of casebooks, lectures, and Socratic questioning, and much more like the work environments that students will graduate into. The book provides an exemplar for how a class can engage with a complex issue from a variety of perspectives and with a broad range of tools, toward a well-articulated common end.

Noveck’s model of collaborative democracy is a direct challenge to the Progressive, technocratic system of American government that has prevailed since the Great Depression. The cult of the technocratic expert, combined with a lack of technologies for effective citizen collaboration, she claims, “have produced an anemic conception of participatory democracy” (p. 18), one in which participation amounts to voting in occasional elections and perhaps discussion with one’s neighbors to generate small-scale public opinion. The theories of Weber and Lippmann, in which citizens were held to lack the ability to make informed decisions on complex policy matters, necessitating a professional, expert bureaucracy, no longer hold, she claims, in a world of rich information resources, spectacular failures by experts in a range of fields, and a bureaucracy captured by lobbyists and starved of resources.

Deliberative democracy, in its current formulations (including those of two institutions this author is affiliated with, the Center for Science Policy and Outcomes and the Center for Law, Science and Innovation, both at...